


4 Times Bakura lets Marik Sebastian Ishtar III drag him around, and 1 time he doesn’t

by ShadowoftheLamp



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series
Genre: 5+1 Things, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 12:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16681438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowoftheLamp/pseuds/ShadowoftheLamp
Summary: Bakura deals with living with Marik mostly by getting dragged along to whatever the former tombkeeper thinks of on a whim, before finding one way of keeping him busy that both of them enjoy very much.





	1. Kitty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mainstream_Deviant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mainstream_Deviant/gifts).



> This was a ton of fun to make, thanks to the organizers for setting it up! I’ve only written ygotas once- for a short joke thing- before, but I looove the series so this was a good excuse to binge the parts I liked and the Marik Plays series again, heh. I hope you like it!
> 
> ...I just reread them and the rules didn't actually specify if the abridged series is okay but I'm gonna hope that it is.

There were a lot of ways to describe Marik Sebastian Ishtar III. Loud was one. Too much was another.  He cried too much, he always insisted on leading the way even when he was arguably the one that was the most lost, he had a night light in the shape of a Pikachu that had the eyes scribbled shut because the franchise was ‘competition’, and he never did the laundry, or really any chores besides occasionally dusting around while blasting Katy Perry and singing along.

Bakura was also completely, utterly in love with him.

So when Marik spouted out plan after plan of ridiculous nonsense that Bakura knew even at first glance wouldn’t work, he still allowed himself to be tugged along, by his hand or his collar or even just by every word from those perfect lips. No matter _how_ stupid said words usually were.

“Bakura, I deserve a cat.” Currently they were resting on top of a hot pink convertible that Marik had stolen. (Or rather, ordered one of his Steves to steal. Can’t dare to get oil on one of his six favorite pairs of pants, can he?)

“And why is that?” Bakura pulled down his sunglasses.

“All good evil villains have cats, right? I mean, look at every Bond villain ever. And they’re just stopping some dumb old spy, we’re going to defeat the Pharaoh! He’s supposed to be, like, king of everything, isn’t he?”

“God-king, yes.”

“Well, I am a villain and so much sexier than any of those wrinkly, stuffy old jerks. Anything they can do, I can do better.” Marik rolled over, and Bakura bolted up when Marik rolled right into his lap, amethyst eyes looking quite akin to a puppy’s. “Gimme a cat, Bakura. Pleeeeeease?”

His hair pooled around his head like the rays of the sun, but his skull was also resting _right_ on Bakura’s crotch, and he had to think _very_ cold thoughts.

“You’d never take care of it.”

“I will!”

“You won’t. You’ll care for two days and then leave it to starve.”

“If- if!- that happens, I’ll get one of the Steves to do it. I think one of them used to be a vet. Or a pet store owner? Maybe a cat-burglar. Something to do with animals.” Marik fluttered his eyelashes, and Bakura’s heart twisted.

He shoved Marik off his lap. “Fine, but you’re cleaning the litterbox.”

(Marik did not, in fact, clean the litterbox, but by then Bakura had fallen for Sir Fluffington anyways. He trained him to scratch up pictures of Yugi.)


	2. Riding

Bakura wondered why he bothered getting on Marik’s deathtrap of a bike. There was a gouge the size of his head on the side, it sputtered disgusting smoke, and Marik was an awful driver.

“Safety fiiiirst~” Marik sang as he slammed a helmet down on Bakura’s head hard enough to make him see stars.

“Of course. Have to have something to protect Ryou’s precious little head.” Bakura grumbled, adjusting it so his skull wasn’t ringing quite so much.

“Ryo- oooooh, right. Haven’t met that little fuzzball much.” Marik shrugged, before jumping on top of the bike. “Come on, you don’t want to get there late and have all the good cards gone, do you? Then you’ll be stuck with dumb ones that nobody can use and we’ll get laughed out of any tournament, and the mockery will ruin my reputation, and then we’ll lose the apartment, and we’ll have to sell our bod-”

“I get the picture.” Bakura threw his leg over the seat, setting his hands down on the chipping leather. “Don’t you have cards from when you ran the Rare Hunters?”

“Sold them to stock up on my favorite hair gel that was going out of style, duh. Now, you’ve gotta hold on to the driver or you’re gonna end up with pudding for brains!” Marik turned his head, then yanked Bakura’s arms forward, settling them both around his hips. “Lock them together like Roger and Eddie from that toony movie and let’s go!”

“How do you even know what that is?” Bakura grumbled, hoping the front of the helmet disguised the pink flushing his cheeks at his arms brushing Marik’s bare midriff, just above his hips. Curse having such a pale host.

“Pegasus sent me a link once.” Marik waved a hand, before settling it back on the handlebars and tearing out of the garage. The slight curves of his body, combined with the vibrations of the seat beneath them, led to Bakura burying his face in Marik’s back. “Hey, not so hard, I'm kinda sweaty today so it's sore. Don’t be a _dick_ , Bakura.” Marik’s tone hadn’t dipped to indicate he was actually genuinely hurt, but Bakura pulled back anyways, instead tightening his grip around Marik’s hips. He could feel the warm skin better that way anyways.

Marik screeched out of the garage, sending a cloud of smoke to settle over everything as he tore his way unto the highway, weaving through slower cars like the world was a pinball machine and he was the ball. He cackled when he nudged against something, and Bakura had to yank him back from crashing them both into a semi that would have definitely totaled both the bike and their spines.

“You know what I hate, Bakura?”

“What do you hate, Marik.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“I hate air pollution. It means my sunbathing doesn’t get the perfect result it should, it gets grime all over my skin, and it gets smoke in my mouth. Ugh. Do you know how many times I had to spit out something thick after riding?”

To his credit, Bakura didn’t fall off the bike laughing, but he got damn close.

They somehow managed to get to the store before the crowds had cleared anything out. Bakura snagged extra copies of Invader of Darkness and Vampire Koala, while Marik was so bad at haggling for a bootleg Ra plushie that he ended up buying it for more money than the man had been asking for in the first place.


	3. Laundry

“Bakura, we’re going to the laundromat.” Marik announced it with authority one morning, and Bakura looked up of his book with half-lidded eyes.

“Why?” Sir Fluffington was curled around his legs, purring happily.

“Because you never do laundry right, so I’ll have to show you!”

“Marik, you had Odion or your Steves do all the housework for you before. I do the damn laundry so you don’t whine, why do you-”

“You always leave it to the last minute, and then I never have any clean shirts and have to walk around without any!”

“I thought you loved your midriff.” Fine, maybe he was a little guilty of exploiting Marik’s hatred of wearing anything dirty- “I wore that tacky bland potato-sack of a robe for years, I deserve only the cleanest of fashion now!”- to see him walk around shirtless sometimes. Sue him. He was only not-quite-human.

“Pfft, of course, but I show that baby off when I want to, not when I need to go _outside_ and it’s _cold_ and I don’t have anything to _wear_.” Marik emphasized the sentence half-randomly like Bakura was the dense one. “So come on, I’m going to show you the right way to do things.”

“I guess I wasn’t doing anything else important today.” Bakura nudged Sir Fluffington away and chucked his book over in the vague direction of the couch before pushing himself up off the rickety chair he’d been settled in. The only reason he was in that one is that Sir Fluffington had clawed up all the others, not that they'd been in good condition to begin with, and the couch smelled like sex- they’d stolen it off the street and had never gotten around to cleaning it.

How he wished it had been them to make it like that.

“You’re never doing anything important.” Marik tutted, before grabbing Bakura’s hand and tugging him out the door.

The laundromat was strangely crowded for a Thursday afternoon, but it meant Marik was sitting right next to Bakura with their arms pressed together and hands almost resting on top of each other, so he didn’t mind as much as he could have. Marik was chattering about how tacos were clearly superior to burritos (“The ingredients can breathe, and that’s clearly important, otherwise they’ll get all sweaty when they’re crammed together, duh ”) until someone’s basket tipped over in front of them.

Who cleaned their lingerie at a public laundromat? Bakura toed at the black thong distastefully, but Marik picked it up.

“Geez, this is useless outside porn. It doesn’t cover anything, who’d use something like- heeey, this would be really good for suntanning!” He flicked it over into the pile of clothes on the floor, turning to Bakura. “We should get some. Oooh, how about a matching pair? I’ve been meaning to ask you to tan with me sometime, you’re pale as a ghost!”

“I am a ghost, technically.”

“All the more reason to get some sun, ya grumpy gus.” Marik flicked Bakura’s nose. “I guarantee you’d go up a point to a ten.”

“You’re saying you think I’m a nine?” Bakura quirked up an eyebrow.

“I’m saying you’d look better if you didn’t look like you’re about to bite my neck and start sparkling like a friggin lisa frank poster, Bakura.” Marik steered the conversation away from the probable-flirting before their washer dinged. Marik clicked the button to open it, but when he tried to pull the clothes out in a single sopping mess, he dropped two socks, three pairs of underwear, and a shirt. He shrieked about dust bunnies and lint, and Bakura sighed, grabbing the basket for Marik to dump the rest into. Marik bent down to gather the dropped articles, ass up in the air and Bakura tightened his grip on the cheap plastic basket.

_____

“You need to talk to him.” Bakura, settled into his creaky bed, itched the back of his neck before realizing that the stray thought wasn’t his.

“Oh, sod off, host.” Bakura said with a groan. He normally didn’t listen to Ryou’s occasional venture towards conversation, but Marik had been dragging him around all day doing holiday shopping, and he was sapped of his mental fortitude to shove him away at the moment. “I thought we agreed you’d let me keep control if you got video games in there.”

“I’m fine, spirit, but if your emotions get intense enough, they bubble over to me.” Ryou wasn’t good enough with magic to manifest himself in a spiritual form, but his tone plucked at Bakura’s brain like an out of tune violin, and Bakura groaned.

“What, my annoyance that he doesn’t ever do anything usef-”

“You love him.” Ryou said it so bluntly Bakura wasn’t sure it wasn’t his own subconscious talking.

“You’ve been reading too many fanfics again. We have a mutual partnership, he lets me crash here rent-free, and if he has a great ass, so what?”

“You know I’m right.”  When had Ryou developed a sassy attitude? He’d need to squash that at some point. “You’re good at putting up walls about everything. Your past, your plans, and your feelings. But he makes you happy and you fancy him, so why hide it? I still get a good allowance, you know you don’t have to stay here if you didn’t want to.”

“Because he’s an idiot.” Bakura muttered. “Because he’s still around, because sometimes he’s funny, because he needs me, because of a lot of things. Now put a sock in or I won’t eat tomorrow and you’ll feel it.”

Ryou receded, but Bakura could feel that he’d only meant to open the idea within Bakura’s head anyways.

He didn’t get much sleep that night, but when he did dream, it was of Marik on a throne of minor antagonists with Yugi as a footstool. Marik looked quite dashing in a blood-red cape, and he didn’t realize until he woke up that he’d been dressed in just the thong Marik had picked up at the laundromat and a matching cape.

Well. At least his subconscious had good taste.


	4. Carnival

“Ooooh, look at that!” Marik nearly dislocated Bakura’s shoulder as he dragged him towards the milk bottle toss. “That looks just like Mr. Tweetums!”

Indeed, the largest prize was a stuffed yellow bird half as large as Marik himself was, and the second he laid eyes on it, they grew to the size of commemorative Kaibaland plates. “I want that bird. Gimme that bird, Bakura.”

“Get the bird yourself, Marik.”

“Come on, you’re better than me at little precise crap like that, pleeeeeease?” Marik’s lower lip wobbled a little, and Bakura groaned internally.

He really was going soft.

“Fine, but you’re buying the tickets.”

“Deal! I stole some off that bratty kid down by the duck pond anyways.”

“Really?” Bakura was impressed.

“Yeah, he dropped a whole stack of ‘em and his mom came and dragged him off so they were easy pickings!”

Nevermind. Marik didn’t have a slick thieving bone in his body. 

“All right, hand them over.” Bakura held out a hand and Marik dug into his pants pocket, tongue sticking out slightly before he handed a massive wad of tickets over. Holy crap, the kid’s parents must have lost fifty bucks on how many slightly-dusty tickets Bakura currently held.

“Now go win me that bird!” Marik shoved Bakura forward. “I’ll be right back!” Bakura was left staring as Marik melted into the crowd.

Nevertheless, he stalked over to the booth, looking it up and down and ripping off two tickets, handing them to the gum-popping bored employee manning it.

“Six balls, six tries. Six wins gets a big prize, five a medium one, three one’a those little suckers in the back.” The lines slipped out, easily rehearsed, and Bakura narrowed his eyes, weighing the ball in his hand before chucking it.

It just barely slipped past the target.

He growled, tossing the next ball with just as much force, and that one hit the bottom bottle- but it refused to fall.

“Tough luck, kid.”

Bakura whirled around, and the man realized his mistake when his throat didn’t seem to quite work properly anymore. Purple shadow magic leaked from the Ring and encircled his windpipe, and he clawed at his neck.

“The game’s rigged.”

“N-no, it’s-”

Bakura’s grip tightened as he went for Lord Slashington Smythe, and the worker gasped out “Fine, it is, geez, it’s not that big a deal-”

Bakura got Marik his bird, and an assurance that the worker wouldn’t tell anyone about the freaky white-haired magician thanks to the Lord.  

He licked the blood off his lips just as Marik hurried up to him with a grin. “Look, cotton candy!”

“Look, Mr. Tweetums the second.” Bakura said dryly, holding up the stuffed toy, and Marik nearly dropped the fluffy candy at that.

“Oh, I could just kiss you, Bakura!”

At  _ that _ , Bakura nearly dropped the damn bird. Marik didn’t even seem to realize what he’d said at first, until he caught Bakura staring, then waved it off.

“I mean, I wouldn’t actually, that would be  _ super _ gay.”  He finished off the sentence by shoving the candy at Bakura at the word ‘super’ before he snuggled the bird against his cheek. “Oooh, he’s nice and soft- did you feel how nice and soft he is, Bakura?”

“I can see that he’s nice and soft.” Bakura agreed. The way the gold around Marik’s neck and wrists sparkled in the sun, the smile on his face, the way the toy smushed against his cheek that still had just a hint of baby fat. Fuck it. Maybe, when it came to Marik, soft wasn’t the worst thing he could be.

 


	5. You Look Good

 

Everything came to a head on, of all days, the anniversary of the end of Battle City.

Bakura had long since received assurances that Marik had said half of the stuff he’d said just to get everyone off his well-toned butt and that he still hated the pharaoh, but it was still nice that they’d had the day planned to just ride around the city and sample every ice cream store in Domino.

“Are you coming, Bakura?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming, I actually nicked a helmet that isn’t cracked so you’ll stop-”

Bakura stared.

Marik had dressed up for the occasion- his usual cargo pants had been replaced by hip-hugging leather ones, he’d traded out his usual shirt for a golden one that had jewels bedazzled across the chest, and there was a black leather jacket draped over his shoulders.

He’d even deigned to sloppily paint a crown on the side of the helmet resting against his hip, held by fingerless gloves the color of rich royalty.

Bakura swallowed.

“You look… good.”

“Well, duh, I always look good. Come on, we’re burning daylight. That’s a stupid saying. Sunlight is burning already, why’s it matter if we’re burning it? The sun does burn, right? I mean, I know Ra burns, so the sun probably does, but really, science is just a bunch of hooey since the gods fix everything anyway-” Bakura pulled Marik towards him and kissed him.

It turned out, Marik’s lips tasted _just_ as good as they looked. He used root-beer flavored lip gloss, in fact. Marik’s amethyst eyes widened just as Bakura’s chocolate ones slammed shut.

He’d ruined everything hadn’t he? Marik had just started off on another one of his rambles, but all Bakura had been able to focus on were those damned lips. Marik was probably- no, scratch that, definitely- dumb enough to not even realize how crazy strong his come-hither vibes were, and now-

Now, Marik was kissing him back, fingers settled right on Bakura’s ass and squeezing just a little, and everything righted itself again. His lips were just as thick as they looked, and Bakura fumbled for Marik’s own ass. The former tombkeeper keened as he was groped at with eager hands, moaning into Bakura’s mouth.

Marik pulled away first, panting slightly. “Man, Bakura, you’ve got a fat butt for such a skinny guy.”

Bakura was pretty sure he was already beet red, but his face nearly burst into flame at that. “Ryou had the biggest sweet tooth this side of a chocolate factory- shut up!”

“No, no. I like it.” Marik settled his arms on Bakura’s shoulders. “I like it.”

“You’re… freaking out considerably less than I thought you would.” Bakura admitted. “I mean, you were practically flashing signs, but-”

“You’re adorable when you’re all flustered like that, you know that, Bakura?”

This was new- Marik still had the same dopey tone as ever, like he was talking about a particularly cute stray cat, but his eyes had a glimmer of a new kind of teasing humor Bakura had never seen before. “I did not.”

“Well, you are.”

Bakura just moved in for another kiss, and Marik gripped at his hair, tangling dark fingers against deathly-white. Marik nibbled on his lower lip- then bit down.

“Gah!” Bakura pulled away, licking at his lip and coming off with his own blood.

“What, isn’t that sexy? My comics-”

“Forget about them.” Bakura couldn’t help a laugh- it started low, but built into a bursting point in his throat, coming out like a caged bird being set free. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been- been- ugh, you’re a bloody idiot, you know that?”

“Sure, but I’m your bloody idiot.” Marik shrugged, before a grin spread across his face. “You’re a good kisser, Fluffy.”

“You’re not half-bad either, for a straight bloke.” Bakura grinned back, and that caused Marik to break down into giggles too.

“I really got you with that, didn’t I?”

“Didn’t believe it for a second, just wasn’t sure if _you_ did. I’ve never exactly been subtle about how I swing.”

“Hey. Hey Bakura.” Marik whispered into his ear. Bakura felt a shock ride up his nerves as surely as if Electric Lizard had smacked him at the dip in Marik’s usually boisterous voice. “Bet you can’t beat me to the bed.”

Good thing they weren’t actually playing duel monsters, because he definitely didn’t have the disadvantage of being forced not to make a move on his next turn and bolted for the mattress Marik used as a bed.

He was pretty sure the neighbors hated them after about an hour, but he couldn’t care less as he curled up at Marik’s side and drifted off with his cheek on top of a slick, perfect chest, at perfect peace for the first time he could remember in ages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d really love feedback!


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